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Compile error - Alsa library not found

16 December, 2008 - 18:24 — nobody (not verified)

Hello everyone,
I'm new here, and would like to try out Qtractor, which looks very interesting. I'm running Mandriva 2009.0.
I downloaded 0.2.2-Flirty Ditz (gosh, I love that name). I've installed all the dependancies using urpmi. However, ./configure ends with this error:
checking for main in -lasound... no
configure: error: ALSA library not found.

I would be very grateful if you could help me installing this program. Would love to give it a spin!
Cheers,
Guru

P.S. I couldn't attach the config.log file (http error 0 drupal/upload/js). Here's the text:
This file contains any messages produced by compilers while
running configure, to aid debugging if configure makes a mistake.

It was created by Qtractor configure 0.2.2, which was
generated by GNU Autoconf 2.61. Invocation command line was

hi,
(the original long post was snipped for brevity and show the probable relevant portion)
it seems that one (or all) of your ALSA packages are broken and/or should not be delivered properly. It also seems strange that these are official ALSA RPMs provided by Mandriva, specially libalsa2-1.0.18-0.rc3.1mdv2009.0 which I believe should provide libasound.so and is the latter that raised my eyebrows for two reasons: first it is invalid as it is with undefined symbols which is evidence of a faulty build process; second is that it is found in /usr/local/lib, a library location where an official distro package would never place it by standard.

Are you really sure all those libalsa packages are any good?

As root, list which files are provided by your package:

rpm -ql libalsa2-1.0.18-0.rc3.1mdv2009.0

Maybe, for instance, you have some left-overs from some other alsa-lib installation, maybe from source, maybe you could try to locate which offending packages is providing this file. Try:

rpm -qf /usr/local/lib/libasound.so

If the last command shows up something, try to remove that. Otherwise, try moving that file to some other place or delete it you feel brave ;) Then try again ./configure ...

Dear Rui,
Thanks for the quick response.... it worked! rpm -qf /usr/local/lib/libasound.so revealed that it wasn't owned by any package. Same with /usr/local/lib/libasound.so.2. (I have been installing quite a few things the last few days... one of them might have put them there). I moved these to a tmp folder (yup, not brave enough to delete them..). Configure worked like a charm, and so did the rest of the install. I now have Qtractor running on my system!

On a side note, I wanted to configure with VST support, so I downloaded the VST SDK 3 package. Unzipped it, but couldn't find aeffectsx.h or aeffects.h. So I downladed the VST SDK 2.4 package, and compiled Qtractor with VST support. Will I be able to use VST 3 plugins? It's not terribly important for me, I don't see myself using VST heavily in the near future, but just thought it might be worth bringing to your attention.

I've been exploring the world of Linux Audio for the past month or so - I just realised that you're the creator of programs like QJactCtl, Qsampler and Qsynth, which I've fallen in love with! Thanks for bringing these wonderful programs to end users like me. Keep up the good work!
Thanks once again.
Cheers,
Guru

As you can read in the README.VST file, VST 3.0 is not and won't be supported any time soon. Native VST plugin support relies on the good will of some VST plugin developers who dare to give away their code in a open-source license and let that same code be ported to some Linux/X11 GUI toolkit. Fact is, the numbers are few. All of those currently existing are ports of VST 2.3/4 code. None of VST 3.0 implementations has been seen to date and I don't even know if any will ever come this way. It is already hard to let VST plugin developers willing to open up the code, let alone doing the GUI port (which is hard as well). After all, for plenty of them, is their bread and butter.